An assassination attempt: what next for America?

This episode explores the political and social ramifications of an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally.

1. The assassination attempt could significantly influence the political climate and campaign strategies leading up to the presidential election.
2. Former President Trump's near-miss may consolidate his support base, intensifying party unity.
3. President Biden's campaign faces a complex landscape, with potential shifts in public sympathy possibly affecting voter sentiments.
4. The incident may temporarily dampen the polarized political rhetoric, with a call from multiple fronts to lower the heated political discourse.
5. The event highlights the persistent threat and impact of political violence in American history and its potential to disrupt the democratic process.

1: The Assassination Attempt

An in-depth look at the attempted assassination of Donald Trump during a campaign rally, detailing the events and immediate reactions. Rosie Blore: "It had been more than four decades since America last saw a president or former president wounded by a would-be assassin." Idris Kowloon: "If that bullet had been a few millimeters to the right, Trump would have been killed."

2: Political Reactions

Analysis of the political reactions following the attempt, including statements of unity and the potential impacts on the election. Idris Kowloon: "The party will be completely united behind Trump." Rosie Blore: "President Biden has suspended his attack ads against Donald Trump."

3: Historical Context and Future Implications

Discusses the historical precedents of political violence and speculations on how this event might shape future political dynamics. Daniel Franklin: "Four presidents have been assassinated in office... this is quite deeply in the American political heritage."

1. Stay informed about political events to understand their broader implications.
2. Engage in political discussions with a focus on peace and understanding.
3. Recognize and challenge polarizing rhetoric in media and personal interactions.
4. Participate in democratic processes, emphasizing peaceful resolutions.
5. Support measures that enhance security and public safety at political events.

After the shocking attempt to kill former President Donald Trump, how will America respond? Though leaders have called for calm, the risk is that an already hate-filled campaign could take a darker turn (11:06). Our correspondents consider the consequences for the two candidates, the presidential race and America at large

People

Donald Trump, Joe Biden

Content Warnings:

None

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The Economist
The Economist.

Rosie Blore
Hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blore. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Idris Kowloon
And, you know, that's a little bit old, that chart that charts a couple of months old. And if you want to really see something, take a look at what happened.

Rosie Blore
It had been more than four decades since America last saw a president or former president wounded by a would be assassin. Until this weekend. On Saturday at 615, at a rally in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump escaped death by a hair's breadth. A bullet intended to kill Trump instead pierced the upper part of his right ear. As security officers dragged the former president from the stage, he insisted on stopping to raise his fist to the crowd and mouthed, fight.

Fight.

Others were not so fortunate. 50 year old Cory comparator was killed as he dived to protect his family. Two other spectators were critically injured. The FBI named the shooter as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20 year old kitchen worker from Pennsylvania. His motives are unknown, but in a campaign already filled with so much hate, America is coming to terms with another moment of political violence.

Idris Kowloon
Donald Trump was doing a pretty ordinary campaign rally. He was in western Pennsylvania, started to talk about a chart, and he turned his head. Later, we saw a still picture of a bullet racing by, and it seems to have clipped his ear, which means that Donald Trump came probably a millimeter away from dying, which is just an astounding, astounding thing. Idris Kowloon is the Washington bureau chief for the economist. Trump was fine.

Only his ear was injured. His doctors checked him out very quickly. Unfortunately, one attendee in the crowd was killed. Two others were severely wounded. The shooter himself was killed by secret Service.

This was already a campaign that was chaotic, in which both sides seemed to hate each other. And this attempt, I think, will probably take it into an even darker direction. This is still an absolutely extraordinary moment. I feel like the video that we've, I think, all watched so many times already, that's something that we are going to be talking about for a very, very long time. And part of that was also about Trump's response.

Rosie Blore
Within minutes, he was up and pumping his fist and he appeared to be saying, fight. Fight. What did you think about that moment? I mean, he had the presence of mind to know that this show defiance was something that he should have done. I mean, it is an incredible picture.

Idris Kowloon
I think it will be the defining picture of the year, if not the decade. I think also he probably didn't realize how close he had come to death. That's what it looks like. There are pictures of him down. At some point.

He seemed to be asking for issues. He was clearly in shock. But he had enough presence of mind, I think, to, to raise his fist and to say that, absolutely. And I'm sure that that's something that will be discussed a lot. If that bullet had been a few millimeters to the right, Trump would have been killed.

It would have been extremely bad for the country. It would have torn the country apart even more than it already is. I mean, it would be a reprieve of 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, MLK was assassinated, the republican ticket would have been thrown into complete disarray. Trump is days away from being nominated.

The convention would have been both a funeral and an attempt to pick a successor. It would have been extremely, extremely damaging and odd and awful. The political drama of this moment is very striking. Now. Theres a bit of a choice, and in some ways, weve heard Trump play it both ways.

Rosie Blore
That momentary response where he pumps his fist and it sounds like defiance. And he then gave a statement that was much more about unity, much more about the sense of sort of resilience of the american nation and all of that. How do you expect this narrative now to play out? So I think there will be a few days of grace between the candidates. So President Biden has suspended his attack ads against Donald Trump.

Idris Kowloon
He called him on the phone. He said that he was praying for his safety. Trump himself, his own statements have been magnanimous. Thankful to the law enforcement. First responders who were there has called for unity, like you said.

And I think that'll hold for a few days. But already we're seeing Republicans blaming Joe Biden for this. So JD Vance, who's a republican senator from Ohio, put out a statement saying that Joe Biden was at fault for this. Another congressman, Mike Collins from Georgia, said the same. And those kinds of calls, I suspect, will increase over the next few days, I would say, on the political consequences as well.

There weren't that many Republicans who were wavering in their support for Donald Trump, but almost all of that dissent will be over now. The party will be completely united behind Trump. And we have the Republican National Convention starting today in Milwaukee, where Donald Trump will be nominated as his party's candidate for the third consecutive time. He's already arrived there and says he intends to keep to his schedule. What do you expect that event to be like?

It will be interesting to see what narrative is constructed at the RNC. Already, Republicans were prone to a kind of messianic, kind of apocalyptic message around Trump. That just is the kind of narrative that he thrives on. And so the near martyrdom of Trump, which is what this will be written as, could be portrayed in a very kind of fire breathing way in the next few days. And I think we'll see how exactly Republicans react to it.

Rosie Blore
Obviously, a former president nearly died here. It's an appalling day, and there are many implications of what's just happened. One of them will be, of course, for this presidential campaign. We're only a few months out from the election, and there have already been many questions about what was going to happen with Joe Biden and his nomination. How do you think this will affect the Democrats?

Idris Kowloon
Joe Biden had been reeling from a really disastrous debate performance against Trump that was held on June 27. So disastrous that members of his party immediately began to doubt whether or not he could actually contest the presidency again. Biden has been in the political fight of his life. Over the last two weeks, he has been dealing with donors who are defecting. At least 20 members of Congress from his own party have said that he should stand aside, and the campaign strategy has been to play for time until he himself is nominated by the party in August.

The Republican National Convention was always going to take attention away from the president's troubles. The fact that his opponent was nearly killed, I think, will do that even more so. And so if we think, and I do think this, that the rebellion against Biden depended on this kind of constant flow of stories and reporting of defections, I think all of that stops now. And I think the rebellion will be starved of its oxygen. And so I think, somewhat counterintuitively, this, awful as it is, maybe secures Joe Biden's chances of actually contesting the ticket.

Rosie Blore
You really think it stops that call? It doesn't just pause them. You're right, it does pause them. But this is a game of time anyway. So the DNC could nominate Joe Biden formally as early as August 7.

Idris Kowloon
The party is already facing a very, very short cycle. If it were to put someone else in place, and the argument from Biden's campaign is that there isn't enough time to replace him, and that there is no obvious successor. And so even a pause of a few days or a week or longer just enhances that argument even further. So I think that's why it does actually help Biden in that way. And in terms of the race itself, I mean, the economist poll track already had the Republicans narrowly in the lead.

Rosie Blore
The economist forecast model had Trump substantially ahead. What do you expect the impact to be for the actual election? So there will obviously be upswell of goodwill for Trump in the next two days, and the republican convention would have already done that as well. Candidates tend to get a boost in the polls around convention time. And so I think you may see some effect on the polls, but these kinds of events can also be somewhat transient.

Idris Kowloon
So when Reagan was nearly killed and shot, there was a sudden increase in his approval ratings, pretty serious increase. But within a few months, that had diminished and returned back to its prior levels. That was a less polarized time. So you could see something like that happen again. Campaigning will be suspended for a few days, but it will return, and it will probably return to the negative tenor that we've seen throughout.

Rosie Blore
So it's interesting you're saying that this image is iconic. We're going to be looking at what happened on Saturday as an image of the year, but you're not really seeing it as a pivotal moment. You don't think it's actually going to change the outcome of the election. It's just very early to know what this will mean. Other moments in elections that seem like they will change everything.

Idris Kowloon
Remember the access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump in 2016? Even Donald Trump's conviction on several felony charges earlier this year? What tends to happen is that there are small effects on the polls that dissipate over time. And America is still very polarized, very divided. People will feel, I think, more sympathetically towards Trump in the coming weeks.

But at the end of the day, there will be an election, and I don't think that this will turn potential democratic voters into republican voters all on its own. Idris, thank you so much. Thank you.

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Rosie Blore
Donald Trump was going to give a brutal and extremely tough speech at this week's republican convention. He says now he plans to rewrite those words and call for national unity. Last night, Joe Biden gave a televised address from the Oval Office. He said he was praying for Donald Trump and extended his condolences to the family of the man who'd been killed. But he too called for everyone to take a step back.

Joe Biden
There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence ever. Period. No exceptions. We can't allow this violence to be normalized. You know, the political record in this country has gotten very heated.

It's time to cool it down. Disagreement is inevitable in american democracy. It's part of you nature. But politics must never be a literal battlefield, a God forbid, a killing field. President Biden did what a president needs to do on such an occasion, address the nation and appear statesmanlike and appeal for the temperature to be lowered, for people to calm down, and for Americans to resolve their differences peacefully through the ballot box rather than through violence.

Rosie Blore
Daniel Franklin is a senior editor at the Economist. And I think he did an okay job without being a completely wonderful, strong performance. He did make a couple of Biden esque gaffes, rather minor ones by his standards, but nevertheless, unfortunately, he referred to former Trump rather than former President Trump, which he meant to say. And he spoke about resolving differences through the battle box, not the ballot box. And he actually said that twice.

Daniel Franklin
And that rather reminded people, I think, watching, of the trouble with Joe Biden, which he is, that these days every speech he makes is looked at for the signs that he's not quite up to the job. Still, he did the job of saying the right things and trying to make Americans act responsibly and calm down. You said his response wasn't that strong. How do you think politicians should respond to an event like this over which they have no control? Well, you would hope that politicians would respond much as the way President Biden was urging them to respond, which is to try to lower the temperature and to encourage Americans to behave peacefully and to calm down and certainly not inflate the passions that are all too evident and to tone down the tendency to leap to completely unsubstantiated theories about what's happened.

Unfortunately, not everybody is doing that. Many are. And in fact, President Trump, former President Trump himself, I think he's responded pretty well to this so far and has been notably restrained. But some others have been much more incendiary, I would say, in their responses, and have been quick to fan the flames of conspiracy theories in particular. And, of course, this is a very fraught moment for America.

Yes, we're just a few months away from an election. We're heading into the party convention season. The Republican National Convention starts today in Milwaukee, and it's going to be a rather different convention against the background of what has just happened. In fact, President Trump has said that he's completely rewritten the speech that he was going to give, and I think it does present him now politically with a big opportunity to appear presidential and strong and to try to perhaps address and allay some of the doubters that he's had, that he can fulfill the role that some think that he shouldn't have. Again, we often talk about America as incredibly polarized and that this fight is a particularly polarized one, that America is more divided than ever.

Rosie Blore
Do you think that that's actually true? Well, it's a truism. And America is certainly deeply, deeply divided. And there are those who lament nostalgically the days when there was much more collaboration across the aisle. I mean, the truth is that it's always been a divided politics between two parties, essentially, not much room for third parties, and that the battle is always fierce and often very close.

Daniel Franklin
I think it is true to say that it's become ever more heated and ever more reflex antagonistic to a greed that is perhaps unusual by past standards. And I think now there is going to be a lot of introspection about the kind of rhetoric that accompanies that on both sides, and being rather more careful with the often military or battle metaphors that are used along the way. You're painting a very optimistic vision of statesmanship there, where you think that everyone really will try and lower the temperature. Well, I don't think everyone will try to lower the temperature, but I think that at some levels, there will be an effort to do that. But whether it will succeed, of course, that's another matter.

Rosie Blore
Do you think that there's a risk of unrest now? Would you see America as a country at a boiling point or a cauldron waiting to be lit, as some have painted it? I think there's long been a heightened danger that America would face serious unrest. And, in fact, it's not as if we haven't already seen it. After the last election, unusually, the result was not accepted by one side, and there was an attempted insurrection at the Capitol.

Daniel Franklin
So it's not as if we're talking about something that hasn't happened in the rather recent past. So I think there is a very real fear that this could break out again in some way. That is a danger that I think everybody has to be mindful of. It's interesting, isn't it? A number of statesmen, Obama, Biden, Trump, they've all said, you know, there's no place for violence in America and democracy, but actually, there's quite a lot of a place for violence in american democracy.

Rosie Blore
Why do you think America has got such a history of political assassination? I mean, not just violence, actually assassination. Well, you're absolutely right. Four presidents have been assassinated in office. Most recently, of course, John F.

Daniel Franklin
Kennedy, but before that, presidents McKinley, Garfield, and Abraham Lincoln in 1865. So that is just the, as it were, the most spectacular examples. But there have been many other very high profile assassinations, from Martin Luther King to JFK's brother, Robert Kennedy. The ones we remember are the successful attempts on presidents lives tragically. But there are constant threats to those in that office in America.

But one remembers, of course, Ronald Reagan, who survived a very serious assassination attempt, but he rebounded and showed a sense of humour, joking as he was going into surgery that he hoped the surgeon was a republican, and which he also made light of in a speech years later. You're reminded of the many traditions of openness and democracy that have marked the history of this city. Amir missed me. And more recently, there are disturbing examples of political violence. The Republican House leader was attacked on Capitol Hill and nearly killed.

The husband of Nancy Pelosi when she was speaker of the house was attacked in his home. There have been kidnapping attempts of governors and so on and so forth. So this is quite deeply in the american political heritage, and it is disturbing and it is a reflection, I think, of the fact that America can be quite a violent society with very high murder rate and, of course, a big problem of gun crime. Daniel, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Rosie.

Rosie Blore
That's all for this episode of the intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcasteconomist.com. we'll see you back here tomorrow.

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